Progress in our world will be progress towards more pain.

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Monthly Archives: October 2010

Sorry, but the typical “up is down” formulation just doesn’t cut it anymore. This guy is just absolutely batshittingly blinded by his devotion to authority-figure-to-be Rand Paul.

Tim Profitt, the former Bourbon County campaign coordinator for Kentucky GOP Senate nominee Rand Paul’s campaign, gave the AP a non-apology apology yesterday for stomping on the head of a MoveOn.org activist outside a Senate debate Monday night, saying, “I apologize if it appeared overly forceful.” But apparently his pseudo-remorse was short-lived, as Profitt told local CBS affiliat WKYT today, “I don’t think it’s that big of a deal.” (The Lexington Police think otherwise, issuing Profitt with a criminal summons).

And astonishingly, asked if he planned to apologize directly the activist Lauren Valle whose head he stomped on, Profitt said, “I would like for her to apologize to me to be honest with you.”

Don’t know what I can really add that isn’t addressed by Altemeyer in the final link. It makles me sick that people are doing this to each other over fucking politicians. What part of “every single one of them is a rotten asshole” don’t you fuckers get? To paraphrase a quote that I can’t recall the source of: stupid, angry and scared is no way to go through life, son.

Josh Green flagged an incident that occurred outside of the Rand Paul-Jack Conway debate in Lexington, Kentucky Monday night that’s already dominating the news in Kentucky and could easily make headlines nationally.

As the candidates arrived, a group of Paul supporters pulled a female MoveOn member to the ground and held her there as another Paul supporter stomped on the back of her head and neck.

According to the Louisville Courier Journal, “Lauren Valle of MoveOn.org approached Paul and tried to give him an “employee of the month award” from Republicorp…a fake business MoveOn created to symbolize what it says is the merger of the GOP and business interests controlling political speech.”

LEXINGTON, KY (WDRB) — A Rand Paul campaign volunteer admitted Tuesday that he used his foot to pin a Moveon.org activist after Fox 41’s video showed him stomping on the head of the woman outside Monday’s debate in Lexington.

Tim Profitt told reporters he tried to subdue the woman because he thought Paul “was being threatened and I was scared.”

Tim Profitt, a volunteer with the Republican’s U.S. Senate campaign, told The Associated Press on Tuesday that the camera angle made the scuffle Monday night appear worse that it was. He criticized police for not stepping in and says other supporters warned authorities about the activist.

Authoritarian Aggression. When I say authoritarian followers are aggressive I don’t mean they stride into bars and start fights. First of all, high RWAs go to church enormously more often than they go to bars. Secondly, they usually avoid anything approaching a fair fight. Instead they aggress when they believe right and might are on their side. “Right” for them means, more than anything else, that their hostility is
(in their minds) endorsed by established authority, or supports such authority. “Might” means they have a huge physical advantage over their target, in weaponry say, or in numbers, as in a lynch mob. It’s striking how often authoritarian aggression happens in dark and cowardly ways, in the dark, by cowards who later will do everything they possibly can to avoid responsibility for what they did. Women, children, and others
unable to defend themselves are typical victims. Even more striking, the attackers typically feel morally superior to the people they are assaulting in an unfair fight. We shall see research evidence in the next chapter that this self-righteousness plays a huge
role in high RWAs’ hostility.

“I would have never started watching Fox News if it wasn’t for the fact that Beck was on there. And it was the things that he did, it was the things he exposed that blew my mind.” – Byron Williams

According to a police investigation, Williams opened fire on California Highway Patrol officers who had stopped him on an Oakland freeway for driving erratically. For 12 frantic minutes, Williams traded shots with the police, employing three firearms and a small arsenal of ammunition, including armor-piercing rounds fired from a .308-caliber rifle.

When the smoke cleared, Williams surrendered; the ballistic body armor he was wearing had saved his life. Miraculously, only two of the 10 CHP officers involved in the shootout were injured.

In an affidavit, an Oakland police investigator reported that during an interview at the hospital, Williams “stated that his intention was to start a revolution by traveling to San Francisco and killing people of importance at the Tides Foundation and the ACLU.”

I ask Janice about Byron’s favorite TV and radio shows. She immediately bristles at the question.

“I’m not going to get into that. All the reporters who came out here last month were blaming what he did on Rush, Glenn Beck, and the tea party,” Janice says. “Why would you blame the messenger? If Glenn Beck tells us something, and everyone gets upset about it, why blame him?”

Janice says that FBI agents came to inspect Byron’s home and took with them a stack of notes Byron had collected. “He’s been doing a lot of research. He had several binders,” she says.

I talk with Janice about how Byron told police he was heading to San Francisco to “start a revolution” and ask her why she thinks Byron would have targeted Tides.

“I had never heard of the Tides Foundation before all of this,” Janice says. “But he researched it and realized it was a money laundering scheme for the radical left that didn’t want their names attributed to what they were doing.”

I ask Janice if Byron was a fan of Glenn Beck.

“Yes, he liked Glenn Beck, but he didn’t feel he went far enough,” she says. “He’d take it only so far, but stopped short.”

Again, Janice bristles at this line of questioning.

“I had only one hate call out of all the thousands of people who heard about this case,” she says. “Most people have expressed support — not for the act, but for the frustration behind it.”

Janice says that Byron had struggled to find work after his release from prison — he was a carpenter — and was “beaten down and depressed.” With no prospects in sight, Byron whiled away the hours watching the news on television and researching the “shadow government” online.

“Life in a small town can be very cruel,” Janice says, fighting back tears as she recalls her son’s failure to find a job.

“This economy, the way that it is, if people are going to hire somebody, they probably won’t hire an ex-felon,” she says. “If it was boom times, things would have been different.”

She seems eager to defend this stuff now, which is interesting given that she previously told the local news her son “frequently gets in with a group of people that have really radical ideas … I’d say Fox News or all of those that are really radical, and he — that’s where he comes from.” I wonder what she really thinks, and to what degree what she’s saying now might’ve been influenced by her son asking her not to help the librul media blame suchandsuch.

Obviously Beck wasn’t this nutball’s only influence — the article also mentions Michael Savage, Alex Jones of conspiracymongering PrisonPlanet.net fame, etc. — but the “conspiracy” this guy was reacting to was one fabricated by Beck, and I think the guy’s admission that he wouldn’t even have watched Fox if not for Beck says a lot. At one point Janice Williams gets all, “Well if Glenn Beck tells us stuff that pisses us off, why blame him? Don’t shoot the messenger.” Well, for one it’s interesting to hear in that it’s essentially a tactit admission that her son is an unhinged loon, but that aside I’m not buying it. Glenn Beck’s message is one that he crafted himself. It isn’t as though someone handed him a bundle of important documents that he decided to read on-air instead of delivering; he wrote the damn things himself, and any embellishments that “just happen” to to get people extra riled-up are on him.

I mean, you don’t get to incite a riot and then be like, “No way brah, don’t shoot the messenger! They’re responsible for their own actions!” That’s true crazy guy with a bullhorn ranting about jews; they are. But so are you. And it’s a damn shame seeing people get so taken by a moose diarrhea salesman that they’re willing to get all incompetent-homegrown-revolutionary over it; yeah, this guy’s not all there but ponder why he didn’t go on violent rampages earlier in life. All this over the collected “wisdom” of a guy who openly admits he’s just playing a character on TV. Fucking hell.

(And uhh, about that last part I bolded? Sorry lady, I know you love your son and all but “ex-felon” is not the appropriate classification for guy who’s currently in jail for engaging in a shootout with the Oakland PD.)

Not only are the FBI still spying on American citizens for no particular reason, but they’re apparently so shitty at it that all it takes to find their “hidden” GPS devices is to get an oil change.

A California student got a visit from the FBI this week after he found a secret GPS tracking device on his car, and a friend posted photos of it online. The post prompted wide speculation about whether the device was real, whether the young Arab-American was being targeted in a terrorism investigation and what the authorities would do.

It took just 48 hours to find out: The device was real, the student was being secretly tracked and the FBI wanted its expensive device back, the student told Wired.com in an interview Wednesday.

The answer came when half-a-dozen FBI agents and police officers appeared at Yasir Afifi’s apartment complex in Santa Clara, California, on Tuesday demanding he return the device.

Afifi, a 20-year-old U.S.-born citizen, cooperated willingly and said he’d done nothing to merit attention from authorities. Comments the agents made during their visit suggested he’d been under FBI surveillance for three to six months.

…

Afifi, a business marketing student at Mission College in Santa Clara, discovered the device last Sunday when he took his car to a local garage for an oil change. When a mechanic at Ali’s Auto Care raised his Ford Lincoln LS on hydraulic lifts, Afifi saw a wire sticking out near the right rear wheel and exhaust.

Garage owner Mazher Khan confirmed for Wired.com that he also saw it. A closer inspection showed it connected to a battery pack and transmitter, which were attached to the car with a magnet. Khan asked Afifi if he wanted the device removed and when Afifi said yes, Khan pulled it easily from the car’s chassis.

“I wouldn’t have noticed it if there wasn’t a wire sticking out,” Afifi said.

Later that day, a friend of Afifi’s named Khaled posted pictures of the device at Reddit, asking if anyone knew what it was and if it meant the FBI “is after us.” (Reddit is owned by CondeNast Digital, which also owns Wired.com).

That’s pretty rich. “We can has our illicit GPS tracking device back plz?” Uh, only if you can explain how something that you attach to my car without my permission doesn’t become my property. See you in court.

Cranick hadn’t forked over $75 for the subscription fire protection service offered to the county’s rural residents, so when firefighters came out to the scene, they just stood there, with their equipment on the trucks, while Cranick’s house burned to the ground. According to the local NBC TV affiliate, Cranick “said he offered to pay whatever it would take for firefighters to put out the flames, but was told it was too late.They wouldn’t do anything to stop his house from burning.”

The fire chief could have made an exception on the spot, but refused to do so. Pressed by the local NBC news team for an explanation, Mayor David Crocker said, “if homeowners don’t pay, they’re out of luck.”

The story has generated an interesting debate among conservatives over at the National Review online. Daniel Foster wrote about it, suggesting “this is bad for libertarians.” While he has no problem with systems that allow people, particularly in rural areas, to opt into public services voluntarily, he questions the moral reasoning of declining to put out the blaze, with the firefighters standing there and the homeowner offering to pay “whatever it would take.”